In the history of ideas of the West, concomitant to the development of Mediterranean and European political thought, there was the development of an antipolitical tradition. Just as North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome contributed traditions to the foundation of the political as a concept in medieval and modern Europe, those same traditions contained within them its antithesis.1 While the political came to fruition in modern thought with the theory of the State as the primary vehicle for the organization and ordering of the mass society produced by capitalism, its opposing element evolved into the anti-state theory of anarchism.
Yet it was in the natures inherent in these two developments—one an organizing principle, the other, its contradiction—that they would not compete on historically equivalent levels. The peculiarities of history did not allow each to be compared to the other on its own terms or in the context most favorable to it. Political societies and nonpolitical societies, that is those societies in which there was an attempt to contain power by routinizing or institutionalizing it and those societies in which this question did not arise, could not be expected to have been encouraged in their development by the same forces.
Instead, the political, as an idea dominated by the positivity of the State, found convenience with the exigencies of certain sectors of the population of the new, class-conscious society. The functional interests of these classes fell within the capabilities of the State as an administrative apparatus, thus confirming its significance in utilitarian terms. On the other hand, and again in historical, economic, and ideological processes, the antipolitical was translated and transformed into ethical theory, theology, and philosophy, that is into forms of idealism.
These were not, however, simple processes. As the structural transformations of European society became more explicit, that is as traditional formations became less effective in maintaining institutional and structural coherences, these processes responded through crisis-specific, situation-specific permutations. The political and nonpolitical in dialectic consistently assumed historical forms. The persistence of their dialectic resulted in an opposition complicated by the transitions in European societies from theocratic institutions to constitutional and parliamentary ones; from feudal economic organization to capitalist modes of production; from agrarian societies to manufacturing and then industrial concentrations of production; from rural life to urban life; from peasant-dominated populations to proletarian ones; from regional integrations to national centralizations. It was, in fact, out from the very center of these transformations that the modern notion of the political emerged.
The young Karl Marx addressed himself to this development perhaps nowhere more brilliantly than in his short essay, “On the Jewish Question.” In it, Marx indicated that he believed that the civil society, which had emerged from the ruins of feudal society, had been fixed by political transformation and revolution. The State had emerged, and in its most progressive form, that is as a secular projection of the bourgeois class and its interests, had founded its existence on the ideology of political liberty. The State in its highest form had achieved political emancipation.
In this short essay, Marx was anticipating by more than thirty years what T. H. Green would write in 1879:
To ask why I am to submit to the power of the state, is to ask why I am to allow my life to be regulated by that complex of institutions without which I literally should not have a life to call my own, nor should be able to ask for a justification and what I am called on to do…. I must be able to reckon on a certain freedom of action and acquisition … and this can only be secured through common recognition of this freedom on the part of each other by members of a society, as being for a common good.2
But Marx saw the relationship between the State and true emancipation quite differently. He argued that the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation was not a true one. For him, the political was at best a “devious” instrument to be used for human emancipation, “by emancipating himself politically, man emancipates himself in a devious way, through an intermediary, however necessary this intermediary may be.”3 Ultimately, the political was such an instrument because the State could not attack or change its base: the civil society. This civil society (which Marx would later identify as bourgeois, capitalist society) was exploitative and oppressive for the mass of its “citizens.” Yet the State could not dissolve it without destroying itself. The State, despite its capacities for guaranteeing political liberties, could not transform its social basis.
In realizing this contradiction, Marx achieved the insight which was the precondition for his later concern with the social revolution (The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), “the withering away of the state” (The Communist Manifesto), and the transitory democracy described as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (The Civil War in France). In his “On the Jewish Question,” Marx insisted on the limitations of that which had come to be designated the political. He understood that by itself, it was incapable of transforming bourgeois society. He also understood that in the historical process of this transformation, the political would have to be transcended. Writing in 1844, in his essay, “Critical Glosses,” Marx would put the relationship of the political to social transformation in the following terms:
Revolution as such—the overthrow of the existing power and the dissolution of the old conditions—is a political act. But without revolution Socialism cannot carry on. Socialism needs this political act in so far as it needs destruction and dissolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its ultimate purpose, its soul emerges, Socialism will throw the political husk away.4
With these realizations, Marx, for the time being, achieved a reconciliation of the political and the antipolitical: though a useful instrument, the political itself would be transformed by a deeper, more profound process—social revolution.
Yet the problem of the political was and is not merely a programmatic one. It is also analytical-conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological. If, in terms of one liberationist tradition, mechanistic or vulgar Marxists have understood the political in terms much more shallow and much less ambiguous than Marx himself, it is also true that, in the meantime, the political has come to dominate Western social thought. It has become a basic grammar, a mediation, through which the outlines of social reality have been generated. In other words, the political has become a paradigm.
The inquiry into the nature of politics probably demarcates most accurately the boundaries of our intellectual landscape. The evolution of the state toward what Max Weber called maximally politicized society, the unprecedented concentration of bureaucratic and technological power which economically and culturally dominates the rest of the world, creates a climate in which all problems cast a political shadow. We may flee from the political dimension of our experience or we may embrace it in order to do away with it, but we are obsessed by politics.5
In current Western social sciences, there are many ways of approaching or using the political as a paradigm. For example, there is formal and organizational theory, political history, systems analyses, normative theory, institutional analyses, political sociology, behavioral analyses, etc. Each presupposes aspects of the political as reality. However, they are contained explications, that is, they are paradigmatic. They are exercises through which the political persists rather than instruments by which that persistence might be explained. As such, there is a restriction of insight into the nature of social organization. It is with this persistence and its concomitant restriction that this essay is concerned. The concept chosen through which to make the deep incision is political leadership. This concept is at the root of the paradigm, and, as such, demonstrates the contradictions resident in political order.
The declared and/or implicit goal of most historical societies has been persistence; persistence in terms of social integration, biological continuity, and cultural integrations. By “historical,” I mean here those societies which have existed in reality over time. Vico called them nations. I mean to exclude those illusory entities often mistaken for nations which have maintained a sense of continuity by constructing “histories” (e.g., the English Commonwealth, the United States of America, etc.).
With regard to persistence, however, the concept of political leadership is dysfunctional to the social sciences as a social and analytical instrument. The presumption that political leadership is a concept through which the event of social organization can be made recognizable is a specious one. Yet it is this same presumption which underlies both liberal and radical attempts at social reorganization and “perfection.”
An historical evaluation of political leadership would render at best an ambiguous judgment of its functionality. Yet the model persists in the absence of a precondition for its abandonment: a critical historical evaluation requires an alternative model of organization. The absence of this alternative would appear to be consistent regardless of the political culture or political tradition and institutions involved.
As well, detrimental impacts of political leadership on a society are qualitatively intensified the more concerned its ideologists are with those liberal, bourgeois freedoms that Marx and others have addressed themselves to—that is, those “freedoms” posited on principles of individualism. More specifically, in psychological and analytical terms, the forms of political leadership tend increasingly to subvert the capacity of the individual to respond to his or her environment creatively, intelligently, and ingeniously. In short, one impact of political leadership is sociopathological—sociopathological in existential terms and ultimately for the attempt to recognize the nature of reality. This is so since political leadership is an affirming element basic to the ideological nature of Western social science.
The task, then, is to capture in its most fundamental terms, in its most authentic dimensions, and in its various institutional forms, an explanation for the retention of political leadership as a social instrument. The task requires that one look at the means by which our species recognizes and characterizes the significant phenomena of its reality: the identification of objects which anticipates the identification of problem-objects which, in turn, anticipates the identification of solvent-objects. This seemingly extraordinary dimension appears appropriate since political leadership is posited as cross-cultural (not merely across apparent cultural boundaries such as between England and France, but presumably across real boundaries as between Lapp and Amhari) and almost anthropological.
Paradigmatically, political leadership seems related to political authority which is, itself, related to the larger and inclusive concept: Authority. Authority, in turn, relates to Order. But, I would argue, Order, as a logical element, has two prior epistemologies—one rooted in perception, and the other rooted in the psychological. The task requires that the phenomenological process of each be traced systematically and deliberately, not merely for their relatedness but for the character of that relatedness. One must estimate continuously the coherent and its context, the incoherent, considering constantly the seminal influences of the irrational on the rational. In short, the nature of knowledge as it relates to choice must be explicated—in this instance the choice for political society, political organization, political structure, political culture, and institutions.
As a consequence of the nature of this investigation into the interstices of Western political thought, I have chosen, as instruments, approaches which have a marginal relationship to the “world hypothesis”6 of political order—approaches which convene critically if not exactly with what Michel Foucault called the “Counter-sciences.”7 Specifically, these are the sciences and arts of the mind: psychoanalysis, analytical mythology, neurophysiology, Gestalt psychology and structural linguistics, ethnography, and philosophies of history (Marx, Hegel, Freud, etc.). Through these I intend to abuse the political consciousness.